The Odyssey is one big travel nightmare. It’s all there—Odysseus and his crew get delayed, they get lost, they get separated, their vessels break down, they get low blood sugar that makes them mutinous. You definitely do not want to travel like Odysseus, but the latest adaptation of Homer’s epic by Christopher Nolan may have you wanting to visit some of their journey’s destinations on purpose.
The text of The Odyssey is set in two primary locations: Troy, or present-day Turkey, and Greece, namely the Greek islands. Some are mythical, others, like Ithaca, actually exist. Odysseus (Matt Damon) and his dwindling crew spend ten years voyaging from Troy to Ithaca, where his wife Penelope (Anne Hathaway) and son Telemachus (Tom Holland) loyally await. In order to create this diverse world, Nolan and production designer Ruth De Jong looked beyond the expected locales (although Greece and Italy, a country of classical Mediterranean appearance, do ultimately feature quite heavily) and shot in Morocco, Iceland, and Scotland as well.
De Jong, who sat down with Traveler to tell us where The Odyssey was filmed, says, “We wanted to start in the Mediterranean, and we wanted to end in the Mediterranean. But Chris and I were not interested in an entire sun bleached sort of vibe.” Scouting took them all over the world—De Jong looked at Australian beaches and Japanese woodland—before they landed on the final locations, the relative proximity of which were more logistically appealing. Below, De Jong takes us through her favourite places to film.
Greece
“We were there for a month,” says De Jong of shooting in Greece. Scenes filmed in Odysseus’s ancestral home included his unfortunate adventure into the Cyclops Polyphemus’s cave, which took place at Nestor’s Cave, a well-known site in the Peloponnese region, near Pylos. Telemachus’s visit to Sparta, where King Meneleus reigns with his newly-returned wife Helen (Lupita Nyong’o, who also plays Helen’s sister Clytemnestra) in search of news of his father, stopped at an olive grove in Messinia for the hunting scene. The homecoming of Agamemnon (Benny Safdie) to Clytemnestra was shot outside at Methoni Castle in Messinia as well as outside Athens at the monolithic Acrocorinth. “That worked well, with the flags and the banners,” says De Jong. “And Chris wanted to just make sure that it was so clear how windy our entire shoot was. So, so windy.”
Italy
Southern Italy features heavily in the film—namely, the island of Favignana off the coast of Sicily, which stood in for Ithaca. De Jong had actually visited Favignana around a decade ago—“friends took us over [from Sicily] who were local Italians”—and remembered it while scouting. “We scouted the entire main island of Sicily,” she says. “[But] it’s just too populated. There were a couple places we really liked but that paled in comparison to Santa Caterina, this 15th-century castle on the top of this hill [on Favignana]. It was just the most epic landscape, where you could see the water everywhere you were and the ships [used for filming] could pull up.” They shot there in the off-season, when the already sleepy island was at its quietest. All those viral interviews about the cast and crew hiking thirty minutes up every day? That happened here, and De Jong was among the trekkers: “Chris and Emma [Thomas, Nolan’s producer and wife] hiked up every single day. I always hiked up. All of our construction elements were brought up via helicopter, and any crew that needed to could use the helicopter. But everyone got into it and loved that daily challenge.” The interior palace [on Ithaca], meanwhile, was built on a stage in Los Angeles.
Iceland
Iceland, says De Jong, was the only country Nolan knew he wanted to shoot in from the jump. “He said, ‘Ruth, I already know in my mind’s eye I want Hades to be Iceland, and I want it to be the black sand beaches and shoot in the middle of the summer, in a full daylight day. It never really got dark,” says De Jong. They passed by Diamond Beach and other heavily-touristed stretches of sand and in favor of more remote locations, such as the beach beside Hjörleifshöfði mountain three hours east of Reykjavik. “Interestingly enough, we found Apollo’s Beach with the cattle, and the white sand in Iceland too, but no one would ever know it was just six hours in the other direction [from the black sand] because it’s sun bleached and has lush fields,” she says. “I was hell bent on getting the Greek cattle, you know, with the horns, and found a breed in Iceland that was from that Greek cattle herd, and utilized those guys.”
Morocco
Troy was shot, not in Turkey, but a Moroccan village in the Atlas Mountains called Ait Benhadu. Says De Jong, “The village [allowed us to] triple the size of our Troy. I built about two and a half acres of Troy, as sets, that we could burn, right up against the village. We got permission to do the fire and the burning—they were like ‘No problem, you can burn your sets down just not our village.’ So at the end, that’s when you see the men running through Troy. Morocco was very hot and very tough, but I was pleased with the outcome.” On the same scouting trip, they found the interior of Meneleus’s palace in Marrakech. The discovery site of the Trojan Horse was filmed on the beaches of Essaouira on the Atlantic coast—this is also where Odysseus and his men departed Troy to begin their journey home.
Scotland
“Odysseus would never have gone to Scotland,” says De Jong. “But that was irrelevant—it wasn’t supposed to be Scotland. It just happened to have the look that we liked.” For what exactly? The witch Circe (Samantha Morton) and her lonely home on a verdant cliffside. Odysseus’s men and then Odysseus himself climb up this serpentine path, past her sedated lions and tigers to her table where she feeds them and sculpts them into pigs. “Circe’s house was really special,” says De Jong, “We emulated those craggy rocks [of the landscape] just outside Cullen in the Highlands. It had that feeling of being in the middle of nowhere.”
